I presented a session for the Association Executives of North Carolina recently, called 7 Deadly Sins of Online Community Management.
Community Management Sin #1: Lust – Launching with a focus on member acquisition
Think about why people engage in communities – they’re looking for context, a sense of belonging. Newbies need time to get acclimated. If you launch your brand new community with an immediate focus on “acquiring” new members, that will put these newbies off, especially if there’s no value or content for them when they first arrive. Instead, focus on helping your current members seed the community with content and build value. And focus heavily on the onboarding process for members in their first year, to help people feel involved and engaged from the outset.
Community Management Sin #2: Gluttony – Using too many community features
There are only a few basic community features you will need at the outset. Discussion forums, private messaging, user profiles and a directory are really all you need. You do NOT necessarily need blogs, for example, which are far and away the #1 feature that nobody actually uses. Another example – hundreds of dormant groups. Set minimum activity levels and requirements so that every group has a person responsible for keeping it active. Ask your online community platform vendor, “what functionality and features can we turn off”? during implementation. Vendors will always lean towards showing you all the great stuff their platforms can do – but during your initial setup, err on the side of the smallest number of functions possible. You can add more in later phases, when there is a proven need.
Community Management Sin #3: Greed – Expecting your community to grow too big and too fast
There is a magical tipping point when a community flips from being run by a community manager, to when the community becomes self-sustaining. One best practice suggests that you need 50 active members (creators and commenters, not just creators) to hit the critical mass needed. Which should be an achievable number for any association, but it will generally take around 6 months (at least) to get to this number. The key is to pace yourself, to set expectations with the powers that be about how long this will take, and you need to invest in community management. Think of your community as a garden – if you leave it untended for even 2-3 weeks, it can spell disaster.
Community Management Sin #4: Sloth – Failing to do daily community management work
Effective community management is a process comprised of tasks that need to be carried out on a periodic basis. Here are some sample tasks from our community playbook.
- Daily – monitor the community and ensure questions are not left unanswered (by sending them on to relevant members, if not answering them directly).
- Weekly – seed discussion posts, if your members aren’t posting often enough.
- Monthly – do a community newsletter. Find one awesome discussion post, one member to feature, and one fantastic resource that was shared – send that out through your external email marketing channels.
- Quarterly – remind members of your terms of use. We don’t do this enough, particularly when it comes to hot-button association risks like anti-trust. It’s very important to train your community managers about risk. If you’re regularly reminding your members of the rules, they cannot claim ignorance of them if something come up.
- Yearly – revise your community strategy – which is a write up of why your community exists and how it’s tied to your organizational strategic plan. Revisit the functionalities of the community, see what 20% of inactive functionalities you can cut.
Community Management Sin #5: Wrath – Over-emphasizing or over-enforcing community rules/guidelines
It’s important to have rules, but it can chill responses and activity to come down overly strong on an infraction. A CAE rule of thumb is to “put a member between you and a problem” – meaning having a member in a senior volunteer position be the one to lay down the law could be the way to enforce a rule without it seeming heavy handed on the association side. And letting the community police itself to some extent – wait a little bit to see if other members will respond to a rule-breaking post.
Community Management Sin #6: Envy – Being jealous about the success of other social networks
Reinforce the difference between your community as its own entity, not as compared to other social networks. Choose 5-8 key performance measures and metrics to show the successes and progress of your community, to maintain a good level of “share of mind”. Keep expectations around slow and steady growth, not supersonic growth. Look out for declines in activities. Take screenshots of qualitative community activity doing what it should be doing – attach those to your reports so those stories can show the community’s progress.
Community Management Sin #7: Pride – Your community manager is aloof and standoffish towards members
Don’t be the association that doesn’t allow its community manager to be actively part of the community. The community may be “by members for members” but the importance of having a community manager who is a known and friendly face cannot be overemphasized. Make sure they can be found easily, make them visible.
If you don’t fall into the traps of these seven deadly sins, your community has every chance of thriving.
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